Page 91 of Homeless

She began to watch his water, because Ignacio had told her to, and because it gave her fear a thing to measure. He passed almost none. What there was came dark, scant, wrong, though she had got cup after cup into him. She did not know entirely what it meant, save that there was something terribly amiss with a body that took water in and gave very little back. She got more water into him. She counted the swallows. It was the only thing her hands could do for him, and she did it through the night like a rosary.

On the fifth day, Padre Ignacio entered bearing the gold cross she recognised from Estella. He wore it on a chain about his waist, with a stole over his shoulders, and in his hands, he carried a jar of water. He bowed to Elizabeth, said something about Spiritus Sanctus, and sprinkled several drops of the water on Darcy’s chest.

“Wait, wait,” she said in Spanish, holding up a hand. “He is not —”

But Ignacio only shook his head and told her this was necessary. He must. He then drew out a little vessel of oil from within his cassock and touched it to his fingertips. He bent over Darcy and swiped the oil gently over his eyelids.

“Per istam sanctam unctionem,” he said reverently.

Elizabeth was shaking her head. “No, Padre, no, no…”

He rested his hand on hers and said, in Spanish, “I anoint for prayer and healing, not death. If God wills.”

Not death… If that were so, this still looked a good deal like Last Rites. She watched in dazed horror as Ignacio continued, touching the oil to Darcy’s ears, nose, hands, and even his feet.

“He is too sick to confess,” the padre said as he finished. “But I lift his sacrifice to God and pray that to be his confession.”

“He has nothing to confess,” she murmured as she stroked his sweat-streaked hair. “Whatever you are asking God to forgive, you may tell Him He is mistaken in the case. He is the best man alive.”

Ignacio made the sign of the cross over Darcy, then he rose from beside the bed. “Then you must pray to God that he remains so.”

XXXV

Stay

Elizabeth’s hours had become a relentless circle that never covered new ground, save when it expanded or contracted. After seven days, Darcy’s shivers were no longer as deep and aching, and the sweats no longer soaked the entire bed. He had gone an entire day without delirium, and was now sleeping in what almost looked like peaceful recovery.

She had not taken her eyes off him since dawn. It had come upon him suddenly, and she was trying not to permit herself to believe it, but the fact was plain. His brow was cooler. His stomach had not protested when she made him drink the broth with bread soaked in it.

Today, for the first time, there was nothing for her to do but watch him sleep.

Padre Ignacio found her thus — sitting with her hands empty in her lap, watching Darcy breathe as though watching could keep him doing it. He stood in the doorway a moment, and then he went away and came back with a small, untidy bundle of papers under his arm.

“You read English,” he said in Spanish. “You write — you are educated, yes?”

Elizabeth roused to her feet and came to meet him halfway across the room. “Yes, very well,” she replied in his own tongue. “What are these?”

He put them into her hands and ran his fingers through his thinning hair. He shook his head and gestured at the papers, telling her that many of them were to do with his clerical duties, while others had been brought to him because he was one of the few men in the town with an education, but speaking English had never been a part of that. He told her, somewhat ruefully, that apart from Spanish, he had only his Church Latin and a bit of French.

Elizabeth returned to her chair by Darcy’s bed and laid the papers on the little table. Letters. Some in a laborious, blotted English that looked like the work of someone trying to answer previous documents but who only understood the cognates, not the words or the proper structure of a sentence. She sorted through them and the texture of his clerical life and duties came up off the pages: appeals for grain, for blankets, for the return of a requisitioned building; a dispute over a wagon; a careful, dignified, badly-worded request that a Captain White of the British commissariat might see his way to releasing a portion of stores for the sick and the orphaned of the parish, of whom the padre had — she turned the page — a very great many.

“You must ask the British for all this?”

He held up his hands. “First the French, now the British. They have what I need — the medicine, the flour, the beds. They answer letters, if the letters are written so a busy officer will read them and not laugh. Mine, they laugh at, I think. And then they are slow.” He tapped the blotted page. “They would not laugh if you wrote.”

“Not at my grammar, at least.” She spread the requests over the table and began grouping them, sorting them by the date at the top. This would only take her a few hours, but by the look of the padre’s letters, she might gain for him supplies worth a month of prayers.

“I will write so he could not decently refuse and would be a little ashamed of himself if he tried. Give me a pen, Padre. I shall earn our board yet. God knows we cannot pay it at the moment, but when we return to England —”

“You have paid it.” His hand went to the cross at his hip. “This will buy the flour for a month and the medicine I had none of. It will bury some and feed more. You owe nothing.”

“But you have fed us, nursed us and cared for our mules. I saw you out the window this morning, Padre, giving them hay and oats, and all of that has a cost.”

He smiled gently and put his hand on the letters. “Who knows? You may save another life, Señora.”

He left the room and returned a moment later with pen, ink, and more paper. “You watch him so hard, he might burn from it. Rest your eyes on something else, Señora. Worry makes a person sick. Work makes a mind easy.”

“What makes my mind easy is him,” she said, looking up at Darcy. “He is better today.”